In an excellent
Vanity Fair article about Brooks, Suzanna Andrews takes a
look at this, and quotes a former colleague who describes Brooks
as “'very, very, very ambitious,' and prepared to go to great
lengths 'to get on.'" Here are a few other good takeaways from
her piece about how Brooks rose to power:

She got close to lots of powerful
people.Brooks is a notorious social climber. She
was close with former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife
Cherie, and with the current Prime Minister David Cameron, who "reportedly signed his
letters to her 'Love, David.'"

But most importantly, she got close to Rupert Murdoch, who sees her like family and
“has been key in her rise.”

She was more ambitious than anybody else.
The British media describes Brooks' opportunism as 'terrifying'
and 'phosphorescent," according to VF:

[At 20 years old] she showed up at the Warrington office of
The Post, a now-defunct national tabloid. As Graham
Ball, then the features editor, recalled to the BBC, she approached him and said, “I am going
to come and work with you on the features desk as the features
secretary or administrator.” He told her that would be
impossible, as he was moving the next week to work in the paper’s
London office. On the following Monday, he showed up at his new
London office “and there she was.”

She got people to do things for her. A
former News of The World reporter told Andrews that
"she’d get you to do things. She had this charisma, this magnetic
attraction. She would praise to high heaven, make you feel like
you were on top of the world. It was only afterwards that you
realized you were manipulated.”

She never stopped working.
“She was going at 150 all day,” a source told VF. “She was very
intense. I thought she was a very insecure woman, actually,
desperate for a lot of love and attention." Another source said
that "in the 15 years he has known her 'I never heard her offer
an opinion about anything in politics. She was interested in
power.'"

Now Brooks is dealing with the ramifications of her quest for
power, which led her to resign from her CEO job this summer.
Although she may come out of the scandal technically unscathed,
it's worth noting that she didn't have a rush of people come to
her defense when the details of the scandal came out.